Lauren Greenlief isn’t much for downtime. Most weeks, she spends Monday through Thursday traveling for her job as a retail consultant. Come Friday afternoon, the 125th-ranked amateur in the world flips a switch to begin three days of practice to maintain her position as a terror of the women’s mid-amateur golf scene. Greenlief played college golf at Virginia but passed on a career in the professional game. Soon after she gained mid-am status at age 25, she won the 2015 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur at Squire Creek Country Club in Louisiana. Since then, she has remained a selective but prolific force in amateur golf: since June 2018, Greenlief has played in just nine events, but she’s finished outside the top five just once. Included in that stretch was a run to the quarterfinals of the 2018 U.S. Women’s Amateur — the farthest that any mid-am had advanced in the Women’s Am in decades. In August, Greenlief will appear in her seventh Women’s Am at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss.
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LYING FOUR: Your trajectory toward the Women’s Am is so different than most of the other players who will be there.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: Yeah, I’m one of the old ladies.
LYING FOUR: Well I’m 38, so I wouldn’t say that. Anyway. When you were finishing up at UVA, did you give serious consideration to turning pro, or did you always envision the sort of work-golf balance that you have now?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I thought long and hard on it. Coming out of college, I always had the dream to play on tour, as many college kids do. But I also had a really good job offer in hand coming out of my masters program. So I thought about it, and the conclusion that I came to was that I wanted to get my career started — go get started in the consulting world, in the business world, establish myself a little bit — because you can always go back and play golf. And actually, by going to work and continuing to play golf, I sort of rediscovered my love for the game. And I kept getting better and better each year. So I definitely thought about it, but I made the right decision for me.
LYING FOUR: A lot of people must watch you play golf and wonder, “What if?” Have you ever gone there, or are you at peace with the path you chose?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I’ve always been at peace with it. Playing with high-caliber players in college, I knew at the time that I just wasn’t ready to do it and wasn’t at the level that I needed to be. When I look at my game now, I’m a lot closer. My stroke average now is probably four shots better than it was in college, so I’ve made a lot of improvements.
LYING FOUR: How in the world are you better now as a regular human being than you were in college, when you had more time to practice?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: A lot of it is mental. In college, one thing I struggled with was going to tournaments and playing with the extra pressure of, “I need to play well so I can make it in the lineup for the next week,” rather than going out for me and trying to win the tournament. Now, the alternative to playing in a golf tournament is being at work. So I enjoy being on the golf course a lot more. I have the mindset of, “I’m out here to play for me. I’m out here to play to win.” Once I was able to shift my mindset, I was able to make that leap and start playing better golf.
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LYING FOUR: What do you do from 9 to 5?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I am a principal with the Boston Consulting Group. We are a management consulting firm, and I work in the retail sector with large retail companies across the United States. We get hired for a set period of time to solve business problems. I do a lot of work in strategy and operations and cost-reduction — those are mostly our three primary areas.
LYING FOUR: When do you practice?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I typically travel between 200 and 220 nights a year.
LYING FOUR: Wow.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I don’t do a lot Monday through Thursday. My typical routine is that I get on a flight Monday morning and I get home Thursday evening. So I concentrate on golf on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. On Friday afternoon, after I get off from the office, I try at least to hit some balls and putt. And then I play and I practice on Saturday and Sunday. I’ve found that I have to play a lot more in the time that I’m golfing — that way, I can be really targeted on what I need to work on. Playing helps me understand where my strengths and weaknesses are, so I can be targeted and focused, since I typically only have three days a week to practice, if that.
LYING FOUR: So your practice regimen changes, based on what you’re seeing out on the golf course.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: Yeah, and I track my stats really closely. I use a pretty sophisticated practice and golf stats piece of software, so I leverage that to really get an understanding of where my strengths and weaknesses are, so I can attack those.
LYING FOUR: Where do you like to play around there?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I play out of International Country Club in Fairfax, Virginia. It’s the course where I grew up playing and learned how to play the game. I joined there after college. That’s where I play most of my golf.
LYING FOUR: And what does your game look like? What do you do well?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I’ve always been a pretty solid ball-striker. I hit a lot of fairways and a lot of greens, and my proximity to the hole is pretty good. I’ve always found that ball-striking is one of my strengths — and I think when you go to some of the bigger tournaments, like the U.S. Women’s Amateur and you get firm greens and tougher conditions, that really helps my game translate. Simply keeping the ball in the fairways and hitting a lot of greens gives you more opportunities. I’ve been really lucky throughout my career that ball-striking has come easy. I’ve really been working on my putting, especially converting more putts from 20 feet and in, so that when I get birdie opportunities, I can convert them.
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LYING FOUR: You mentioned that you grew up playing at International. How did you get into golf as a kid?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I started playing when I was 5. My dad is about an 18 handicap — he plays every day, and he loves the game more than anybody I’ve ever met. I started just playing golf with him: going to the driving range, riding around in the golf cart. I played a lot of sports growing up — I was a competitive swimmer for about 10 years; played soccer; did some other stuff too. So I learned golf at a young age, and then came back to it when I was about 12 or 13 and started playing tournaments.
LYING FOUR: Well, to hear that somewhere out there, there’s an 18 handicap whose 5-year-old grew up to be a great golfer is music to my ears. That hits pretty close to home.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: Yeah, he plays every day, and he’s probably the most competitive golfer I’ve ever met. He plays in a lot of net tournaments and takes it very seriously. I think I got some of my competitive drive from him.
LYING FOUR: I read that you walked on at UVA. Were you recruited by other schools, or did you just really want to go to UVA?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I was a little bit of a late bloomer in golf. I played tournaments in high school. And at the time, UVA was going through a coach transition right when I normally would have been recruited. Jan Mann had stepped down, and Kim Lewellen was coming in, so it was a weird timing issue with recruiting in the state. I got some looks from some smaller schools — but being from Virginia, education was really important to me, and having such a great in-state school with academics and athletics — when I got into UVA, I reached out to the coach and asked for a tryout. I think I shot 71 in the tryout and made the team, so everything worked out.
LYING FOUR: So did you keep playing amateur tournaments straight out of college?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I did. I’ve never really stopped. The year I got out of college, I made the U.S. Amateur and continued to play in all the events that I could. When I became a mid-am at 25, I said, “Hey, now there’s another national championship I can play in; let me go see if I can win that.”
LYING FOUR: Was there a moment when you realized “I can do this” and that you had the skillset to compete at the highest level?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I’ve always kind of had that. I’m very competitive and very Type A, both in my job and in golf. I’ve always believed in myself. After college, I had some successful finishes in a lot of Virginia tournaments and some other regional events, so I knew I could do it. I went into the first Mid-Amateur that I was eligible for thinking, “Hey, I’ve committed the entire summer to playing golf; I know I can win this” — I just took that mindset in and was able to convert. That helped build my confidence, and it’s continued to build since then.
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LYING FOUR: It must be really hard to do both of these things really well — work and golf.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: It’s a big commitment. The way I look at it is that you can be really successful at two things — there’s enough time to commit to work and golf. Sometimes that means that I can’t go to brunch; I don’t go out a lot on the weekends. But that’s perfectly fine with me. My boyfriend has played in a U.S. Mid-Amateur and a number of four-balls; he’s a reinstated amateur, and he plays a lot. So at our house, it’s helpful to have two people who care a lot about golf and someone to pursue that passion with. I’ve really chosen to focus on those two things and have committed pretty hard the last seven years of my life. But there are some tradeoffs.
LYING FOUR: As you’re alternating between these different parts of your life, do you ever have weeks where you come back to golf and something just absolutely has gone to hell? Every time I’m playing well, I come back a week later and, inevitably, three of the four wheels have fallen off the car.
LAUREN GREENLIEF: It happens sometimes. Generally, the pattern I see when I’m working and playing golf would be that I come back and hit balls on Friday late afternoon, and then when I play, it’s not that the wheels have fully fallen off the game, but I’ll make a bogey here and there that I wouldn’t normally make. I think I’ve had to learn a little bit of patience on that — just needing to warm up and get my head into it. The gauge I generally use is that Friday is usually a little shaky, then Saturday should be solid, and when Sunday comes around I should be playing well again. As long as I feel like my game is progressing through the weekend, I’m generally pretty happy about it.
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LYING FOUR: Do you know anything about Old Waverly?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I haven’t played Old Waverly, but I know a little bit about the history. I’ve heard it’s a great golf course. Obviously they had the U.S. Women’s Open there in 1999 and the Women’s Mid-Am in 2006. There’s been some pretty prestigious USGA champions to win those — Juli Inkster and Megan Stasi. So there’s a lot of history there with women’s golf and the USGA. I’m really excited to go play there.
LYING FOUR: So what was it about last year? What clicked?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: Last year, going into it — honestly, I was a little frustrated from San Diego two years ago, missing the cut by a shot and having never made match play. That was disappointing. So I decided last year, going into the Golf Club of Tennessee, I was going to try and win the stroke-play portion — instead of going in and saying, “OK, I need to play well to make the match play,” it was “I need to play well to win.” I played a little bit more aggressive; I played my game; I made more birdies. I went out there and was nowhere near the cut line — I was closer to winning than I was to missing the cut. Having that mindset of trying to win the stroke-play portion rather than just trying to squeak by helped me mentally get over the hump. I think I was the 7 seed going into the match play, and I didn’t have the stress that I’d had in previous years when I’d been really close and just missed out winning. This year, I’ll probably take that same mindset in and just try to be aggressive, play my game, try to win the stroke-play portion, and reset for the match play. It was a mental thing, more than anything.
LYING FOUR: You joked earlier about being an “old lady” in the field — and again, I wouldn’t call you that — but is it weird being the wily veteran in the field now?
LAUREN GREENLIEF: I think it’s just become normal now. Since I became a mid-amateur and have been one of the oldest ones in the field — normally, the Senior Amateur champion is there, and there’s a handful of mid-ams that I’m friends with, and we’re kind of a community — it’s almost become the new normal. Pretty much in every women’s amateur event I go to, I’m one of the oldest ones in contention, if not in the field. I think that’s just the state of women’s golf now: there’s so many great junior players — and in the girls’ game, people peak a lot younger, so the fields are a lot younger. I just try to leverage my experience and use that to my advantage as much as possible.
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All photos: credit USGA
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